I spent some time today browsing smaller mom and pop stores in Toronto (College/Spadina, if there are any Torontonians here) looking at the various types of media they have. It’s amazing what these stores have, in terms of rare/obscure media compared to big chains like Best Buy or Future Shop.

Here are some highlights of what I saw:

Verbatim DigiMovie 4x (or Digital Movie, the ones with the film reels on the disc/packaging). Unfortunately, these were quite expensive at $7.99+tax for just five discs.

Old Mitsui CD-R. The shop owner said that these were imported from 3-4 years ago.

One lone JVC 8x DVD-R. To my surprise, this disc was MIJ and not the Chinese crap that JVC usually sells. Anyone think it’s TYG02?

Fujifilm 8x DVD+R for video, with DVD case. Okay, I cheated…I saw these at Best Buy. The price looked decent at about $10+tax for 10 of them. These were MIJ, so they’re probably T02’s.

Optodisc DVD-/+R in a jewel cases (with Optodisc branding). I’ve only seen Optodisc sold in spindles of 50, with almost no branding.

Philips 25GB BD-R. These are made in the Netherlands (I’m thinking about picking up some BD-R media despite not having a burner for them yet, because first generation media is usually higher quality because of almost no outsourcing – I’ll probably get a drive at the end of the year)

Verbatim VideoGuard at a Grand & Toy. I’ve read about those here, but haven’t seen them in person. These were expensive at $17.99+tax for either 5 or 10 discs.

And for my best find of the day, Unifino 4x DVD-R. These are MIJ (and the packaging is in Japanese as well) and are sold in packs of five with slim cases. Surprisingly, these are the only ones I actually bought. I remembered that these discs performed well in the UV resistance tests (done by the individual in Japan) and picked up a pack right away. I thought the price was very decent at $4.51 for five ($0.90/disc). I’m going to burn one later today and that will decide if I’ll be getting more of them (or buying them all from the store).

So I burnt one of the Unifino discs (MID: UTJR001001), and all I can say is wow. It was going really well, then BAM

The TRT looks like it’s a bit wobbly too.

I think it may be the fact that my drive doesn’t like this media because of the lack of support of this MID. If you look closely, PIE is rising as if it were a staircase. And as well, the jitter is surprisingly low.

When burning with the LiteOn: Make sure you manually enabled Online Hyper Tuning and Hyper Tuning [although HT is probably already auto-enabled for the “unknown” MID]. It might also pay to disabled SmartBurn.

I’m not sure how well it will work, but worth trying. I also second the suggestion to try a strategy sway.

I’m not going to take a picture of the packaging right now (it’s more interesting than the disc) as I’ve torn it up pretty badly. When I get some more later this week, I’ll take pictures of the new packages.

[quote=cd pirate;2092689]Wow it does look like great media, judging by the scan.

What speed were those burnt at?[/quote]

I burnt them at their rated speed, 4x.

Edit: As you can see in the third image, there’s something written on the inner hub. It says: INTERMEDIA MADE IN JAPAN 86931624EDBE X